‘Bird’ is an audacious, mesmerizing tale of a gritty life as told through the lens of a twelve year old girl on a council estate in Gravesend, Kent, whose struggle falls in a long tradition of British social realist dramas, stretching back to Ken Loach’s ‘Kes’ in the 1960s. Bayley (Nykiya Adams) is looked after by her young father (a tattooed, wayward Barry Keoghan) while her mother is living with her abusive partner, and the closest she gets to finding a role model is when Bayley falls in with a local gang that does vigilante work for people who, like Bayley’s mother, are victims of abuse or violence.

A saviour does come from a most unexpected quarter in the form of the free-spirited, nomadic, kilt-wearing Bird (Franz Rogowski) who is trying to trace his own family roots. He does not own a phone and spends his nights living on the rooftop of one of the local housing estates, and has an ethereal, bird-like simplicity which attracts the curiosity of Bayley, herself a conduit for the local crows and seabirds who adorn the sky above her and who appear to be watching protectively over her in the days leading up to the wedding of her father to his latest girlfriend, and for which Bayley is required to wear a hideous leopard-print jumpsuit in accordance with her father’s wishes. These two outsiders form a symbiotic bond. At first Bayley is suspicious of Bird’s interest in her, but she soon takes on the role of shepherding this lost soul as he arrives in the town to trace his lineage.

Never having met his parents, Bird does not have much to go on by way of clues, but these two lost souls support each other in a time of crisis. There is also a scene of enormous power, shot in a magical realist mode which is at odds with the more socially realist construction of what comes before it, and it is this interplay and use of counterpoint which paradoxically heightens the intensely human scale of this drama of wounded figures in need of redemption. The wildness of the animal kingdom is matched by the inner chaos and unkempt world within which Bayley resides, including the graffiti-strewn apartment block where she lives with her half-siblings and her dad’s new fiancé and her young daughter, yet this is an optimistic tale which teaches that there are alternative scenarios through which we can look at the world.

Bird at first looks like he is a threat, but it is the characters who occupy more domestic roles that pose the biggest danger to the domestic space, and ‘Bird’ takes us on a journey where we get to celebrate the outsider as champion and where every child gets to have – whether in imagination or reality – a guardian angel who will stand up for them just when they are most needed. And do listen out for a scene where Barry Keoghan is dancing to ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ – a very meta and funny reference to his award-nominated performance in ‘Saltburn’.